boardgames

Civ the boardgame is... ok. It's not great, it's not terrible. There are other boardgames that do what it does much better. It feels very paint-by-numbers and mechanistic. The game is also very slow to play, with fiddly turns that have a lot of extraneous moving parts that need to be accounted for.

Edit: if you want a civ-style game that is a lot better and you don't mind the sci-fi theming, I'd recommend Eclipse.

I recently tried the Witcher board game. Production value off the charts, but it really did feel like nobody actually play tested the thing. There were some glaring problems that should have been noticed after 5 minutes of play with somebody trying to win rather than just experience the game.

The fact that you can win relatively trivially by ignoring 75% of the core mechanics and just focusing on punching other players is pretty ridiculous. The quests feel absolutely useless, and sometimes actually punish you for daring to attempt to complete them. You need to houserule the crap out of that game to make it functional.

The slay the spire board game is a weird one for a different reason. They tried so hard to make it faithful to the computer game that the coop aspect of it feels tacked on and hollow. There's very little interaction between players, and it just feels like you're waiting for somebody at the table to bring their build online, at which point everyone else becomes irrelevant.